Intersection Episode 5 English Subtitles

[Emmanuel Des Meaux]

Bitterlyat odds during their lifetime, they both got their dreams realized in the Jewish State. At that little intersection in Tel Aviv, the two interlocutors are locked in figurative eternal embrace in a country the grandeur of which neither could have foreseen.

An ancient prayer has become a modern love song. Thanks to God have become transformed into something just shy of pillow chat. Liturgy expressing relief for having survived the night becomes a promise of a future filled with goodness.

Last month, Israel and Poland came close to the precipice in their diplomatic relations when Israel's Yair Lapid reacted strongly to a new Polish law. The law sets a 30-year limit on legal challenges to property confiscations that had taken place decades ago.

Given the vociferousness of Israel's response to the law, it might seem that its anti-Jewish nature is beyond debate. That's not the case, however. In this conversation with David Bernstein, one of the truly great guides of Israelis and others to Poland, we hear much about the complexity of that law, and about the relationship of Jews to the Polish story in general.

A few weeks ago, when our newest grandchild was just a few weeks old, his mother (our daughter-in-law) was scheduled to take an important exam with a government ministry one morning. The baby was awake all night in those early days. As our son was still clerking at the Supreme Court, and he, too, needed to be functional during the day, we told the kids to stay with us and I\u2019d take the baby for the night. They could sleep, and the baby and I would have good bonding time.

The little guy and I had about six hours together, in the dark of the night, with the rest of the house asleep. For hour after hour, as I held him in the rocking chair or paced the house with him asleep in my arms, I sang to him. For some strange reason, one song that seemed to calm him particularly was Meir Ariel\u2019s \u201CModeh Ani.\u201D So I must have sung it to him fifty times that night.

As the sun began to rise (relevant to that song, as we\u2019ll see), I wondered: when he\u2019s older, will he appreciate the miracle that that little song is, how it\u2019s an embodiment of the very essence of what this country is supposed to be? I hope so.

Outside Israel, conversations about Israel after quite often conversations about the conflict. Inside Israel (hence, Israel from the Inside), they hardly ever are. Micha Goodman, one of Israel\u2019s most important public intellectuals, explained it this way, in a very recent interview in Haaretz:

Most Israelis, including on the right, don\u2019t want to rule over the Palestinians. They\u2019re deeply uncomfortable with enforcing a military occupation over a civilian population. And most Israelis are very worried about a pullback that will allow [the Palestinians] to threaten us. \u2026 Faced with the need to reconcile both those feelings, Israelis have become paralyzed and indifferent, which is why for a decade now you haven\u2019t seen the big demonstrations for peace of for building new settlements, which once drew tens of thousands of people. Instead, we\u2019ve had big protests for social justice and over the price of cottage cheese and affordable housing. Not because we\u2019ve solved the conflict, but because we\u2019ve become indifferent to it.

He\u2019s exactly right. It\u2019s not that people don\u2019t care, it\u2019s that they have no expectation that anything on that front is going to change anytime soon. But that doesn\u2019t mean that Israeli life is suspended as we wait; quite the contrary. The miracle that is this place unfolds daily, often seen most powerfully in unexpected intersections.

Two of the great early leaders of Zionism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha\u2019am. Herzl, whose seminal book, The Jewish State, launched political Zionism, believed that what the Jews needed more than anything was a state of their own. Ahad Ha\u2019am (a pen name which means \u201Cone of the people\u201D; he was born Asher Ginzburg) disagreed, though. Statehood, he thought, would sully the Jews. They would do better to focus not on politics or statecraft, but on culture. What he thought the Jews should create in Palestine was not a country, but an oasis of Jewish cultural depth, a place where the richness of Jewish intellectual and artistic life could be reborn.

Herzl and Ahad Ha\u2019am were thus two of Zionism\u2019s early titans, fundamentally opposed to each other\u2019s worldview. Herzl believed that without a state, the Jews would not survive Europe\u2019s venom. Ahad Ha\u2019am believed that having a state would do them in, sully them. Herzl knew virtually nothing about Jewish texts and culture, while Ahad Ha\u2019am was deeply learned, the quintessential Zionist renaissance man of letters.

That\u2019s what I love about the intersection of Herzl and Ahad Ha\u2019am Streets in Tel Aviv (see photograph above). In the end, both Herzl and Ahad Ha\u2019am got their way. The Jews got the state Herzl wanted, and in that state, they created the cultural renaissance that Ahad Ha\u2019am sought. Without Herzl\u2019s state, Ahad Ha\u2019am\u2019s oasis would never survive. And without Ahad Ha\u2019am\u2019s cultural rebirth, Herzl\u2019s state would have little substance or purpose.

A century and a quarter ago, one could have taken every person on the planet who spoke Hebrew and put them all in one building. Today, some ten million people speak Hebrew as their first language, and a few million more as their second. That\u2019s why, whenever I go into an Israeli bookstore (the photos below were taken the morning after Yom Kippur), I cannot help feeling that I\u2019m staring at a miracle. The mere piles of books and the hundreds of linear feet of shelves laden with books in a language that not long ago, very few people spoke, are signs of a Jewish rebirth that could not have happened without Herzl, Ahad Ha\u2019am and Eliezer ben Yehudah, the father of modern Hebrew. (Though I do grant that the translation of a Danielle Steel novel at the very bottom left corner of the photo may not be the epitome of Jewish culture \u2026.)

The same with the sidewalk scene just outside the bookstore. People buying and selling \u201Cfour species\u201D for Sukkot, not in an Orthodox neighborhood but on a regular old Jerusalem main street, as if it\u2019s the most natural thing in the world. What Herzl believed would never happen in Europe. What Ahad Ha\u2019am hoped would happen here.

But (back to the theme of intersections raised by the photograph above), the most powerful signs of Jewish cultural rebirth in Israel are usually hidden below the surface. Therefore, today, in this season of rebirth and new beginnings, this period of reflecting on the past and imaging a better future, a quick look at that Meir Ariel song mentioned above, and at how a popular Israeli song by a secular artist is actually a riff on a traditional, fairly-well-known Jewish prayer. More Ahad Ha\u2019am.

Now, we add Meir Ariel to the mix. Ariel (1942-1998) was first publicly noticed for a song he wrote after serving in the Paratroopers Brigade of the IDF and participating in the battle for Jerusalem in the Six-Day War. At that time, Naomi Shemer\u2019s \u201CJerusalem of Gold\u201D had become an informal national anthem.

Shemer\u2019s \u201CJerusalem of Gold\u201D was a passionate celebration of the reunification of Jerusalem (she wrote that stanza after the war), but Ariel was disturbed by what he saw as the rabid hyper-nationalism the victory had unleashed. In response, he penned wrote a sobering \u201Creply\u201D to her song, and called it \u201CJerusalem of Iron.\u201D

The album cover showed Ariel in military fatigues, and with time, Israelis began to refer to him as the \u201Csinging paratrooper.\u201D But Ariel, who fought in the Yom Kippur War, as well, had an only moderately successful career as a musician until his death in 1999 as a result of a tick bite.

During his career, though, he wrote still other songs that were plays on earlier Jewish texts, including one that is in dialogue with that prayer, \u201CModeh Ani\u201D, above. (In a previous column in this series, we spoke about a different Naomi Shemer song, \u201COver the Honey, Over the Sting,\u201D and saw many of the classic sources that she wove into that song.)

And is it really God to whom Ariel is speaking? We don\u2019t know. God gets no mention in the first paragraph. What we do know is that Ariel thanks some \u201Cpresence\u201D not for restoring a soul, but for many things, and for things that have happened not only to him, but to his family, his nation, his land\u2014and all humanity.

By the second paragraph, though, Ariel isn\u2019t speaking to God, or to some \u201Cpresence.\u201D He\u2019s speaking to a woman (the \u201Cyou\u201D in Hebrew is the female form). He\u2019s awake, but she\u2019s not. He\u2019s presumably looking at her, watching her sleep, and she smiles at him even as she sleeps. The future, he promises her as she sleeps, will bring them goodness, much goodness. She laughs. At him? With him? To him? (The Hebrew says \u201Cto.\u201D)

Ariel was hardly the most talented performer in Israel\u2019s history. Much like Leonard Cohen (and Noami Shemer, for that matter), the quality of his voice didn\u2019t match the genius of his lyrics. But here he is, performing his own song (make sure that you have English subtitles turned on by clicking on CC if necessary).

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